History

The diocese was founded in 1938 when a group of 37 Carpatho-Russian Uniate parishes were received into the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, having the year before officially renounced the Unia with Rome, primarily in protest over Latinizations occurring in their church life, particularly a 1929 papal decree mandating that Eastern Rite clergy in the US were to be celibate.

This move marked the second group of Carpatho-Russian parishes to return to Orthodoxy, the first having been led by St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre into the jurisdiction of the Russian Metropolia in the 1890s. This second return to Orthodoxy by Carpatho-Russians in America was directed toward Constantinople rather than to the Russian presence in America primarily because of fears of Russification which had occurred with the previous move. As such, rather than being absorbed into the body of the Russian churches in America, the ACROD was permitted by Constantinople to keep its distinctive practices, but removing things such as the Filioque from the recitation of the Nicene Creed.

The ACROD today

Besides its 75 parishes, the ACROD has one seminary located in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Christ the Saviour Seminary. The bulk of the diocese's parishes are in the United States, with one in Canada, and nearly half are located in Pennsylvania. There was formerly a diocesan monastery, the Monastery of the Annunciation in Tuxedo Park, New York, but it was closed in the early 1990s.